Modern consumers are inundated with choices. Numerous varieties of products are offered to consumers, with consumers having unprecedented opportunities to select products that meet their needs. The opportunity for selection brings with it the need to spend time and effort engaging in the selection process. The development of widely used and inexpensive processing systems has led vendors to develop techniques for directing customers to products expected to satisfy them. One area in which such systems are particularly useful is that of entertainment products, such as movies. Numerous customers may view the same movie, and in addition, each customer is likely to view numerous different movies. Customers have proven willing to indicate their level of satisfaction with particular movies, so that a large volume of data is available as to which movies appeal to which customers. Proper examination and processing of this data can be used to recommend movies to particular customers, and such examination and processing can be conducted for any sort of product or service for which data can be collected.
The remainder of this discussion will be presented in terms of ratings of movies, although it will be recognized that the teachings of the present invention can be applied to any situation in which it is desired to estimate the desirability of an item for a user. In this context, a movie recommendation is essentially an estimate of the rating a user would give to a movie that he or she has not yet viewed, based on computations based on previous ratings. One approach to computing ratings in order to generate movies is to use a factorization based approach. Such an approach identifies a set of features that characterize all movies and ratings, and uses these features to identify the closeness of users rating items and items being rated with the item and user for whom a rating is being estimated.